Online Copyright Agreements for Authors

“A team at Science Commons — which includes…[law prof] Mike Carroll — has just released the first set of Science Commons’ Authors Addenda, designed to aid the author in the attempt to “change the terms of a publisher’s standard publication agreement to ensure that you, the author, retain certain freedoms to use your article and to post it online.” http://sciencecommons.org/literature/authoraddendafaq

“There are three versions of the addenda, retaining different levels of freedom for the author. The addenda can be used by any scholarly author, from law to physics. While publishers can obviously refuse to accept the addenda, many are willing to go along with them and there is some reason to hope both that publishing norms are shifting to accept this practice, and that universities — particularly those which wish to maintain viable institutional repositories — may be supportive of their use. (MIT already offers such an addendum.)

“Please spread the word widely. It would be nice to see the norms change so that some version of this addendum becomes the clear custom in the scholarly world.”